Particularly in pharmaceutical industry, various industrial processes and research processes for creating certain chemical compounds involve suspensions. Suspensions basically comprise a solid phase and a liquid phase wherein the liquid phase can e.g. be a solution comprising a solute dissolved in a solvent. In order to be able to dissolve a favourable amount of solute, the solution is often equilibrated at an elevated temperature close to the boiling point of the solvent. For receiving the solution with less solid phase, needed by following process steps, at a certain stage of the above mentioned processes, the suspension is often separated into the solid phase, i.e. crystals or other solids, and into the solution.
One prevalent kind of such separation of the suspension is filtration. In known filtration devices, frequently the suspension is forced through a filter by means of underpressure applied on that side of the filter facing away of the suspension. The underpressure drives the suspension through the filter. The filter holds back the solid phase up to a certain extent, thus forming a filter cake. A side effect of such filtration can be that said underpressure causes crystal formation of the solution and therefore lowers the amount of solute dissolved in the solvent. In addition, the temperature of the solution is often lowered by such filtration, again causing crystal formation in the solution and lowering the amount of solute dissolved in the solvent.
Particularly in research processes, the use of standardized microplates having a plurality of wells is common. For example, these microplates are standardized in terms of footprint dimensions, height dimensions, bottom outside flange dimensions and well positions. Commonly used standardized microplates comprise 96, 384 or 1536 wells.
Furthermore, again particularly in research processes, the analysis of the above mentioned solid phase, i.e. crystals or other solids, has become more and more important, e.g. to get a deeper understanding and a better control of the chemical processes and of the polymorphic forms of chemical compounds. Such analysis is preferably performed by methods like X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) or infrared and raman spectroscopy. To be able to perform said methods the crystals and solids usually have to be removed from the filtration device and be transferred into specific analysis devices, which can be a quite delicate cumbersome task.
Therefore there is a need for the provision of a microplate-standard compliant device being capable of separating the solid phase from the liquid phase of a suspension providing the solid phase in a manner which is easily accessible for further processing, e.g. analysis.